Camden Spiller and his family have used Maddox Industrial Transformer and a web of affiliated LLCs to buy up much of downtown Battle Ground, Washington, and seat their own people in city hall. In June, they bought the town’s only newspaper. Now they’re building a new church for a pastor tied to Christian nationalist Doug Wilson, and a dedicated group of locals is fighting back.
Key Takeaways
- Camden Spiller, his family, and their business associates have amassed more than 30 parcels across Battle Ground through Maddox and a web of affiliated LLCs, and installed their own employees in city hall, from the mayor’s office to the school board.
- CEO Camden Spiller casts the expansion as a “colonization kind of approach,” and calls staying small “treason to our time”; his Christian nationalist pastor, C.R. Wiley, says the church supplies the “resources to govern unbelievers.”
- In June, the Spillers bought the town’s only newspaper, the Reflector.
- The movement’s network traces to Doug Wilson’s church in Moscow, Idaho, and reaches into the federal government, where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth holds Christian services at the Pentagon.
BATTLE GROUND, Washington — At 9:45 on the night of July third, the fireworks went up right on schedule — paid for, like everything else below them, by a transformer company. For the fourth year, the town’s biggest Fourth of July celebration landed a day early. It unfolded across parking lots, closed streets, and fields between two buildings owned by Maddox Industrial Transformer, and the company covered all of it — the bouncy houses, the face painting, the hot dogs, the cotton candy, the ice cream. This summer, the organizers billed the evening as a double birthday, 250 years of American independence and 75 years of the town, and told families to reserve a spot at an email address ending in @maddox.com. After a warm and sunny afternoon, the place was shoulder to shoulder by dark. Maddox handed out free hats with its logo on the front, an American flag on the back; the garbage cans wore stars and stripes, and red, white, and blue balloons hung everywhere. A miniature train ferried children through it all, and costumed actors worked the crowd as George Washington, Uncle Sam, Thomas Jefferson, and Betsy Ross.
The patriotic party is the visible part. Camden Spiller, through Maddox Industrial Transformer — the fastest-growing business in town — and a tangle of affiliated LLCs, has been buying block after block of downtown Battle Ground and putting his own people in local offices. The mayor and a member of the school board both work for the company. This June, the family that owns Maddox bought the only newspaper in town. The same blueprint is being unrolled 2,300 miles east in Batavia, Ohio.
Camden Spiller, the company’s chief executive, has never called himself a Christian nationalist. He has left that kind of talk to other men. His pastor, C.R. Wiley, told a religious conference that what the church wanted in Battle Ground was regime change — owned space in the town, a bakery that doubles as a Bible study after hours, and a decisive say in how the place is run. From the pulpit, Wiley has named two candidates his congregation meant to put in office. Wiley filed as a candidate for the council himself in 2023 and lost in the primary. His church, he says, brings the resources “to govern unbelievers.”
Spiller is paying to build the new church where Wiley will preach all this — he is raising a chapel for the congregation on land held by one of his LLCs — and he serves on the board of Wiley’s First Presbyterian Church, which belongs to the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), a conservative Reformed denomination distinct from the mainline Presbyterian church. The money flows one way. Wiley’s own disclosure from that council run lists between $100,000 and $199,999 a year in church income, and the holder of his mortgage is C&S Managed Investments — an LLC listing Camden Spiller as an officer, located at the same Rasmussen Boulevard address as several other Spiller companies.
Talk like Wiley’s has become a problem inside his own denomination. In June, a PCA study committee reported to the church’s General Assembly that “Christian Nationalism” spans everything from ordinary civic engagement to positions its officers cannot hold without formally declaring an exception; the denomination’s standards say the civil magistrate may not “in the least, interfere in matters of faith.” The committee wrote that it was “alarmed by the intemperate and unclean speech adopted by some of those who call themselves Christian Nationalists.”
The men behind the Battle Ground project named it themselves. Wiley and a Maddox real-estate executive, Max Booth, branded a 2023 podcast an “experiment in Christian localism,” then pulled the episodes offline once a public-radio reporter started asking about them. Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia and an author who studies Christian nationalism, reads the phrase for what it is: Christian localism, he says, is “another way of saying ‘to Christianize America,’ just not doing it nationally.” A benign strain exists, he told the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) — Christians influencing local policy the way they do nationally. “Then there is the localism that, like its Christian Nationalism sister, tries to Christianize a community, either from scratch or taking over one.”
None of this started in Battle Ground. Wiley and Spiller learned their politics nearly 400 miles east, in Moscow, Idaho, the town Doug Wilson has spent two decades remaking around his church. Wilson’s Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC) counts the U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, among its members, and Hegseth has brought Christian nationalism and Wilson to the Pentagon.
Who Owns Main Street
Start with a coffee. Order one at Al & Ernie’s, the bakery Maddox reopened on Main Street. The pager they hand you to buzz when it is ready comes printed with a line of scripture: “Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”
The bakery is one of more than 30 parcels — some 88 acres pieced together since 2019 — a tally Spiller has acknowledged himself. County property records connect the buyers to him, his family, and their business associates, most of the ground held through limited-liability companies with numbered, generic names: BG Property 10, BG Property 11, BG Main Property. Tax bills go to Maddox offices on Commerce Avenue and Rasmussen Boulevard or to company headquarters in Greer, South Carolina, and the 17 acres under BG Village Property sit inside a deal the city council adopted as the Maddox Infrastructure Development Agreement. Spiller has described the whole portfolio in print as a hospitality business and a small real-estate development company.
The holdings run down both sides of Main Street and cover most of the old downtown. How long the company means to stay is written into a filing under Washington’s State Environmental Policy Act, which sets aside ground for a convention center, a chapel, a 74-foot bell tower, and 173 cemetery plots. By the figures Maddox gave the city council, that means a 14,000-square-foot chapel and 25,000 square feet of event space, built to seat a thousand. The people running the transformer company have platted the ground where their congregation will be buried.
Maddox can afford the patience. Founded in 2015 in South Carolina and expanded to Battle Ground in 2018, it now holds, by Spiller’s own account, about a third of the U.S. market in its niche and is headed toward a billion dollars in revenue. Much of that growth rides the boom in artificial-intelligence data centers; the heavy gray boxes Maddox builds are what keep the server farms running, and they are scarce and slow to manufacture. “If you need electricity,” Spiller told one podcast, “you’re kind of our customer.” That same indispensability put him on the board of Identity Clark County, the group that steers economic development across the county he is reshaping.
Battle Ground is a city of about 23,000 people, a half hour north of Portland, counted at roughly 85 percent white, with Black residents well under 1 percent and Hispanic residents fewer than 1 in 10.
The Gospel of Conquest
Spiller does not hide the theology. He has spent years laying it out on stages and on podcasts, and the framework he keeps reaching for shares ground with writer Aaron Renn, who argues that American Christians now live in a “negative world” that treats their faith as a liability and that they must build their own institutions to survive it. Renn names Maddox as a model, and Spiller has taken up Renn’s concept and vocabulary and pushed it further.
At Doug Wilson’s “Fight Laugh Feast” gathering in 2024, Spiller ranked the Christian corporation above the family shop. The big firms, he said, are the “front lines”; the corner stores are “non-combatants.” He reached for scripture and turned it inside out — the prophets promised a day when every man would sit unafraid under his own vine and fig tree, and Spiller told the room that resting under the fig tree now, while the culture war went on, amounted to “treason to our time.” The bigger a Christian builds, he argued, the more ground he takes. Asked on another podcast how Maddox plants itself in a new town, he described sending in trusted staff who know the company’s ways — a “colonization kind of approach.”
The company runs on that creed. “All corporations disciple their people in a certain worldview,” he said in the same speech, “and I wanted to build a company that reflected my own faith and values.” Spiller openly talks about wanting a workforce that shares the company’s Christian worldview. He serves as an elder in his church and is raising 10 homeschooled children with his wife, a household he holds up as the gendered order he wants the wider culture to adopt. In his telling, a man’s work and his faith are meant to be the same project.
The Company in City Hall
On the first of June, as Mayor Eric Overholser read a proclamation from the dais recognizing President Trump’s order branding the anti-fascist movement a domestic terror organization, a protester shouted profanities and was hauled out and cited for disorderly conduct. A companion proclamation announced the town’s support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Councilmember Jeanie Kuypers moved to strike both from the agenda; the motion failed. Two weeks later, the mayor refused to honor Pride Month and declared instead the “nuclear family” to be a husband, a wife, and their children, then signed it before the public was allowed to speak. Eric Overholser is a Maddox employee.
He is not the only company hand near the gavel. The deputy mayor, Aimee Vaile, is married to a Maddox employee, and the school board’s vice president, Chris Grewell, manages projects for the company. Spiller acknowledged in a newspaper column that the buying has “garnered some attention,” and wrote that his family is “not among Battle Ground’s largest property owners.” He declined Oregon Public Broadcasting’s request for an interview; Wiley did not answer its questions at all.
Then the family that bought the town bought the newspaper covering it. The Spillers acquired the 117-year-old Reflector. The seven-person staff had to reapply for their jobs as part of a six-month review. In an editorial, Spiller promised the news coverage would be neither puff pieces nor punches pulled, and then noted that it would continue to cover his own family and businesses.
In January, the board of Fort Vancouver Regional Libraries, which runs the Battle Ground library, struck the words “equity” and “equitable” from its strategic plan. A trustee resigned. Even Shane Bowman, a Republican councilor, told a reporter: “The challenge will be, as you get bigger and bigger, is there a quid pro quo?” When reporters approached a dozen residents and business owners near buildings Spiller had acquired, several would not talk. One explained why: “They’re a $1 billion company. They push on me, and I disappear.”
From Idaho to the Pentagon
Maddox has an office in Moscow, Idaho, and Spiller goes back and forth. In October 2025, he sat for a filmed interview produced by New Saint Andrews College, Wilson’s school, and talked through what Battle Ground is becoming; the college has since removed the video. Spiller has put his vision in writing, where the college couldn’t erase it. Investing in Battle Ground, he wrote in a Reflector commentary, is “rooted in our faith” — citing Jeremiah’s charge to “seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you.”
Camden Spiller in an October 2025 interview sponsored by New Saint Andrews College, Doug Wilson’s school in Moscow, Idaho. The college later removed the video.
Wilson pastors Christ Church, founded the publishing house Canon Press, and built the CREC into what scholars and reporters call the intellectual engine of the drive to remake the United States into a Christian nation. Logos Press, which grew out of Wilson’s first classical school, tells parents that “education is warfare.” Wilson has snapped up storefronts across Moscow, argued for an outright theocracy, and said women should not vote. When his church moved to expand, neighbors packed a meeting to stop it.
The tie between the two towns is documented. Wiley sits on the college’s board, publishes through Canon Press, and advises the journal American Reformer, where he works out the same embattled-Christian theology Spiller preaches to investors. Wilson, for his part, told reporters he knows Spiller and counts the man’s pastor a friend. It’s a tightly linked boy’s club.
Spiller is a director of American Reformer — the nonprofit’s own tax filing lists him on its governing board — and his pastor’s seat on the journal’s separate advisory board puts Wiley one chair from the people writing the federal agenda. Beside him sits Micah Meadowcroft, until recently the head of research at Russ Vought’s Center for Renewing America — the think tank whose founder helped write Project 2025 and now runs it from inside the White House Office of Management and Budget. Meadowcroft was caught on a hidden camera describing a secret “second phase” of the project, kept off government email to dodge public-records requests.
Wilson’s brand of worship has become a fixture of Hegseth’s Pentagon. Since May 2025, Hegseth has held monthly Christian services inside the building, and Wilson preached at one in February 2026. At the March service, Hegseth prayed that “every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness” and asked God for “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” Under Hegseth, the Pentagon cut its list of recognized faiths from more than 200 down to 31.
Bigger Than Battle Ground
The schools, the council, the library, the local paper — every institution Maddox is bending in Battle Ground is one that the Christian Reconstructionist R.J. Rushdoony marked for capture in 1973, when he argued that biblical law should replace civil law and that Christians were to take dominion over every sphere of life.
The same impulse runs from Moscow to Washington. More than 100 organizations built Project 2025 on that reading of Genesis, and the officials who take “have dominion” as a literal order to govern — Russ Vought at the budget office, Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon — now hold the power Rushdoony wanted in Christian hands.
The strategy of seizing a town from the inside is older still, and its earlier practitioners rarely bothered to hide it. What ties those campaigns to Battle Ground is the tactic itself, and it has passed through far uglier hands than a churchman’s.
In January 2004, at a skinhead festival outside Phoenix, the neo-Nazi Tom Metzger — a former Klansman who founded White Aryan Resistance — told the crowd to quit operating like a battleship and move like a submarine. “Use your periscope,” he said, and “infiltrate your local governments … your school board … law enforcement.” Win the small offices nobody watches, and the rest follows.
Others tried to run the play outright. In 2011, a neo-Nazi named Craig Cobb began buying up lots in Leith, North Dakota, a hamlet of 16, and deeded some to fellow white supremacists — Metzger among them. “I only need 17 people,” Cobb reasoned, because a majority of a tiny council runs the place. His neighbors weighed dissolving their own government rather than surrendering it, and Cobb left town in handcuffs after an armed march down its single road.
The version that worked wore no swastikas. In Redding, California, Bethel Church grew until its members numbered roughly a tenth of the city’s population. The church covered the salaries of several Redding police officers and leased the civic auditorium from the city. By 2022, its members held a majority of the council. A church leader boasted that almost no one runs for office in Redding without first coming through his door.
The closest parallel runs straight through Spiller’s own circle. In Jackson County, Tennessee, the Dallas venture firm New Founding and a sister company set out to buy more than 4,000 acres and draw thousands of like-minded settlers to, in the investors’ own words, “radicalize Main Street.” New Founding’s chief executive is Nate Fischer — Wiley’s fellow American Reformer advisor — and the firm’s podcast hosted Spiller to walk through what he was building in Washington and Ohio. Fischer has spoken at Wiley’s church in Battle Ground. In Ravenden, Arkansas, a group called Return to the Land sells lots on 160 acres to buyers it vets for European ancestry — and asks about religion and views on segregation. A woman of Jewish descent married to a Black man sued in May 2026 after the group turned her family away. Battle Ground has no gate and no application, and the Spillers’ purchases are all legal.
The method is already in its second town, and Spiller has drawn the map himself. Christian companies, he argued, should build “near existing Christian communities” — “That’s been our model here at Maddox from the very beginning,” he went on, running the list from Greenville, South Carolina, through Battle Ground and Batavia to Moscow itself. In May, Maddox opened what it calls a Main Street Campus in downtown Batavia, Ohio — $2.5 million spent restoring a historic firehouse and the two buildings beside it, with room for nearly 100 employees — its second foothold in the village since a production shop brought 65 jobs there in 2023. The company also pledged $10,000 toward Batavia’s America 250 celebration, held on July 2.
“We can’t invest in our people without investing in the places they live,” Michael Foster, Maddox’s director of employee development in Batavia, said in the announcement. Foster wears two collars in Batavia. He is the senior pastor of East River Church, a congregation that spent its founding years in Wilson’s CREC, and he co-wrote It’s Good to Be a Man, the godly-masculinity handbook Canon Press published with Wilson’s blurb calling it “essential.” His byline turns up in American Reformer. And he is the man who, Spiller said on a podcast, “runs that operation.” The book is blunt — “Men were made to rule. They always have and always will,” it declares. He has sat for a full episode beside Wilson on his interview show, Man Rampant.
What the Town Can Still Refuse
Leith could see what it was up against the day Cobb’s plan surfaced. Battle Ground has had a harder time, because what arrived here looked like good fortune: a company that writes paychecks, reopens buildings people were sorry to lose, and picks up the tab for the fireworks — and that has now bought the paper that might have asked the hard questions. Spiller keeps telling conference audiences exactly what he intends, and the rooms applaud. The one thing he has never offered is a name for it. Whether the town treats any of this as a threat is another matter, and the people best positioned to say so, the ones renting from the company or working for it, have already explained what speaking up would cost.
Some residents have stopped waiting to see how far it goes. Week after week, opponents of the company’s takeover rally at the town’s main intersection, sometimes facing pickup trucks that fly American flags and roll coal, belching black diesel smoke over the crowd.
The Rev. Kate Lore, a former Unitarian Universalist minister and Battle Ground resident, rejects the premise that fighting the Maddox project means fighting the faith. “The aim isn’t about opposing Christianity,” she told GPAHE. “Many of us are people of faith ourselves.” Lore belongs to two of the groups now organizing against it, North Clark County Indivisible and Clark County Christians Against Christian Nationalism, and she frames the quarrel in constitutional terms: “It’s about defending the constitutional promise that government belongs to everyone equally, regardless of religion.”
Lore has watched city leaders and the newspaper’s new owners talk openly, in her telling, about “creating a community governed by Christian principles,” and she traces their ties to broader “Christian Nationalist, Christian Militant, and Christian Localist networks.” To her, the property purchases, the company’s hands in local office, and the captured newspaper describe one project she means to see stopped. “The strength of Battle Ground has always been its diversity of people and beliefs,” she told GPAHE, “and we intend to keep it that way.”
A resident who grew up in Battle Ground and asked GPAHE to withhold their name for fear of retribution described a hometown that is becoming unsafe for the people the proclamations single out. Since Overholser and Vaile began putting those declarations to a vote, the resident told GPAHE, the town has seen “an uptick of hate speech and attempted violence.” “My family has considered fleeing the city I grew up in,” they said, “just so I and my siblings, disabled and queer, are safe in public.” In a 2025 survey commissioned by the state’s LGBTQ Commission, 22 percent of the nearly 7,000 LGBTQ+ Washingtonians who responded said they had been the target of a hate crime.
What the resident came back to was family — an eldest child’s fear for younger siblings. “There is nothing like the pain, fury, and terror a big sibling feels when they realize someone wants to hurt their little sibling,” they said, “and there isn’t a clear way to stop it.” They wondered what the town might be “if less folks were poisoned against their own neighbors for the benefit of some CEO,” and what its schools and small shops could do with the tax dollars now going to “public displays for his employer’s ideals.” “I love my family, and I love my neighbors fiercely,” they said. “All I want is for all of us to be safe and thriving.”
Another Battle Ground resident, who also asked GPAHE to withhold their name, sees the national design in the local details. “Project 2025 is real, and it is being implemented in Battle Ground, Washington,” they said. “As a Christian, I am horrified to see the weaponization of Christ’s teachings. Christian Nationalism is the antithesis of Jesus’s message of love.”
At the long council meetings, the people testifying against the mayor’s proclamations are, by the city’s own sign-in sheets, mostly Battle Ground residents — the parents and taxpayers the mayor’s allies like to call outsiders. They have started reading the zoning code. Maddox can buy land with cash, but the bell tower and the chapel still need permits, and a permit can be refused.
For Boedy, it comes down to numbers. “Only a majority movement will beat this minority movement,” he told GPAHE. The localists “know how to use the institutions of democracy to get their anti-democratic goal,” and opponents have to learn the same tools — “neighborhoods to city council districts to school board seats. Rally, organize, and hold elected officials accountable.”
It took a handful of people in the road to turn back Cobb in Leith. Battle Ground has more than 23,000 people. What they decide — at the permit counter, at the ballot box — is whether the town still answers to those who live in it, or bows to a church that recognizes no authority but its God’s. The company is not waiting on the answer. It has already chosen where to bury its dead.
